Rare Book Monthly
Articles - December - 2005 Issue
A Bookselling Sci-Fi Nightmare: The Computers Take Over the Marketplace
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Monsoon, however, forces you to give this up on ABE and use ABE payments -- i.e., now ABE is processing all the credit card transactions through its automated systems. This means that you are no longer aware of failed attempts to purchase and there is no particular guarantee that I can see from ABE that chargebacks will not be applied back to your account for stolen credit cards. This is also a non-starter for us, because we prefer taking responsibility for our own decisions, rather than allowing a piece of software to do it for us.
Then there is the cost, which was revealed at the end of the demonstration. I was told that the software price was over $1,000 up front, plus 3.6% of our sales.
Now, I don't know about you all, but I am sick to death of everyone having their hand out for a piece of every transaction. We already have a cost-of-sales that includes unreimbursed shipping, packing materials, associated labor to process the orders, credit card costs, shipping software fees, overhead allocation and usually an 8 to 20% commission.
To meet the price objection, I was told that I could increase our sales 3-fold daily by using Monsoon. Sounds good on paper, but can you handle packing three times as many books? Will these be expensive books, or books priced down to the nubbin? Will an increase in the quantity of your business require an increase in cost -- more employees, for example? Can you physically replace your inventory at the very least as quickly as it is being diminished?
Investing in this software, moreover, is like getting in bed with a monopoly. Original software of this sort is not readily replaced with another product. What exactly are you going to do when your entire business is dependent on Monsoon and the company decides to raise its commission rates? Or requires some expensive upgrade? Or becomes part of some other company who has different requirements? Or goes out of business?
But concerns aside, and my concerns may not be yours, there was one nightmarish scenario that lingers over all. Imagine that you invest in this Colossus-er-I mean Monsoon software package and it is dynamically adjusting your prices up and down in all these markets several times a day. Say that you have set the rules on your books so that your price is the absolute lowest on Amazon, or even the average of the five lowest books.
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